Yi

In the Early 90's when George Xu came back from judging a tournament on the East Coast, he told us that he had been in an interesting and friendly argument with Nan Lu, a baguazhang practitioner in New York City.

The argument was over how to describe high level Yi. Yi is most often translated "intension," but the English word doesn't do it justice. Some modern Qi jocks now use the word Yinian, generally meaning something more like "mind" but in qigong circles it simply refers to "the pathway along which you intend to send qi."

When George Xu wanted to explain to a beginning student what yi was, he would describe two Doberman-pinchers. Both were told to charge at a group of people. One dog got up close and hesitated, jumping around and barking, not sure who to bite. The other dog, the one with clear yi, immediately bit the neck of the guy with the blue shirt.

George had been arguing that one should train with "killer" yi, the mind should be focused exactly on how to kill the opponent. Nan Lu was arguing that one should have "zero" yi, a mind like a translucent sky. George wasn't willing to concede but he thought Nan Lu's argument had merit.

A more common use of the word Yi, one that nearly all Chinese martial arts teachers use, means to have an awareness of technique. A student has yi in his form when a knowledgeable observer can see the fighting idea in the students movement. Numerous throws, joint breaks, and striking combination possibilities should be apparent.

Every technique must have the correct force trajectories, and these must be practiced on a live partner. These trajectories themselves are also called yi. Martial arts techniques use trajectories which are vectors, arcs, and spirals. All of this is referred to as yi.

One of the magical things about a gongfu form or routine is that because the same movement can be used for many different techniques, a seasoned practitioner will develop more and more complex yi as the years go by. A single movement can have a hundred different expressions.

This seasoned and complex yi at some point starts to look less specific. With very clear yi, it looks like I'm making an upper-cut to the chin. But if I've thoroughly trained 15 different techniques for that movement I can do the movement in what we might call an undifferentiated potential state. Instead of a specific technique or fighting idea showing itself, the yi starts to look like clouds swirling around the body. It is not that you actually see the clouds, what you see is all the possibilities at once.

Practicing at this yi level also feels like clouds, or sometimes like water, fire or mist. Once a practitioner reaches this level, she stops thinking in terms of techniques.

Kumar Frantzis said about Xingyi that when you strike you should be thinking "Only One Thing."

A Samurai by the old code (budo) didn't need technique, he needed only to be willing to die.

Wang Xiangzhai, one of the greatest internal martial artists of the 20th Century, said that "the yi should always be round." I'm working on it.

Song Zhong Jin

I just wanted to throw this term out into cyberspace and see if anyone is interested in discussing what it means.

Song, (first tone in Mandarin) often written sung, is a homonym with pine tree, it means to let go of status, to slack, to relax and to sink.

Zhong means "center," as in Zhongguo (China, center country).

Jin means a type of power which can be cultivated through practice. The word is almost always used in compound form and so it can mean widely different things, like gongjin (empty force, pushing without touching), or tingjin (sensitivity, literally "hearing power").

I believe that song zhong jin means something like: Non-structural power. Perhaps it means power which does not rely on a clear center. It may even mean power which is not transfered or generated through the back, the spine, the bones, or the centerline.

What do you all say?

The Forth Dimension--My Limit

I know I have earned some trust from readers over the last few months. But never the less I suspect that some readers are wondering just how far out I might go.

Well I'm happy to inform you that there is a clear limit to how far I will go. I promise it will not get any more wacko than this.

The following idea occurred to me and although it may be a (rather high level daoyin) stretch, I thought it wouldn't hurt to be the first person to say it.

First everyone should know about this surfer dude, Garrett Lisi. He may have created a unified field theory.

He had been tinkering with "weird" equations for years and getting nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure matched his own. "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," says Lisi. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

Folks, we may be living in 8 Dimensions and only experiencing 3 of them!

Well I've been pondering this during my practice of the last month and thinking to myself, "what if we do have some experience of say the 4th dimension but our brains are wired to make sense of everything in the third?"

The explanations of why and how taijiquan or baguazhang works have never been that great. A lot of us accept the notion that being relaxed with really good alighnment and thinking about very clear force vectors is enough to explain the powers we taiji and bagua guys have, but then again most of us leave some room for doubt.

Well, what if Taijiquan and Baguazhang are actually happening in the fourth dimension?  What if all those strange sensation of yi (intension) and shen (spirit) are actually just shadows of a multi-dimensional experience.  We can't see or hear it, but perhaps we can still play around at the fringes?

You heard it here first, at Weakness with a Twist.

Dizziness

You know that feeling you get when you spin around really fast and then stop? In the cartoons this feeling is usually illustrated with a swirl and some stars around the head. But actually the whole body has this spinning feeling. You can feel it in your knees and elbows too.

With this sort of disorientation it feels as if there is a body that is now still, and a second body that hasn’t stopped spinning yet. As you gain your baring, it feels as if that "other" body comes back inside.

A similar thing happens to me (and I think most people) when I am laying down very relaxed and still. I feel my body start to move around slowly, even though I know I’m not actually moving. I can control it, but it requires that I relax first, it feels like I'm letting myself drift.

Well this feeling of the body drifting out is an important aspect of Baguazhang, Taijiquan, and Internal Martial Arts practice in general. When I soften my movement to the point where I feel like I’m continuously melting, as I turn side to side it feels like my body keeps turning even after I have stopped. If I follow the "other" body, my solid body will lose its integration, so the correct response is to stop and re-integrate. Then I can turn the other way and repeat the experience on the other side.
When doing a form, or practicing push-hands, or even fighting, we control this 'other' body, circling it around and even throwing it like a light silk blanket over our opponents.

A significant number of martial arts techniques gain efficacy through disorienting the opponent in one way or another.  Likewise, a significant amount of training is designed to familiarize us with strange sensations and orientations so that when they happen in a fight we don't get disoriented.

There have been a few studies that show taijiquan training improves balance in older people.  I like to point out that his is "fallout" from, or a  "sidecar" to, the main project of martial training and cultivating weakness, but never the less it is a nice benefit.

Michael Jordon's Tongue

In Chinese Medical theory the finger and toe nails are considered the ends of the tendons. In gongfu we treat our nails like cat claws that can retract and extend.

Of course humans don't have the full extension/retraction that cats do but our nails do move and we can learn to have control over them. Developing whole body tendon integration is a preliminary stage for learning whole body power. To do this one must practice initiating movement from the nails, the outer periphery of our bodies.

Just like the nails are the ends of the tendons in Chinese Medical theory, the tongue is the end of the muscles.

The chansijin (taijiquan silk reeling power exercises)  movements of the head have a little known tongue component. For instance there is a "head forward and back" neck roll that replicates the infant sucking reflex all babies develop. If you do the exercise correctly the whole inside of your throat, including your tongue, will involuntarily come outward and suck back inward with each rolling motion.

The seventh palm change in Baguazhang is sometimes called "snake spits out it's tongue" for the same reason; it is possible to tap into whole body power through activating the sucking reflex in which the tongue goes forward and draws back. With practice, the whole torso will be involved in the movement.

In both of these cases, the tongue remains hidden.  This is a type of secret teaching known as "indoor" or "six ears never hear."
Michael Jordan, on the other hand, has not been shy about showing us his tongue. He is by far the greatest Basket Ball player I've every watched.

Now I ask you, is it a coincidence that he also happens to be the only player who constantly sloshed his tongue around in his mouth and regularly stuck it out when he was making full use of his muscles?  Was he just fooling around, or was that a secret source of his power?

Dong Hai-chuan's foot

Just a simple image for today.

Most Bagua zhang practitioners have heard the story about Dong Hai-chuan breaking a cobble stone with his foot. The story goes, one day a junior student asked why as he was required to walk leading with his toes and pressing his back heal while Dong sometimes stepped on his heel and pushed off his toe? After giving the student a good thrashing for asking a question, Dong went over to a solid cobble stone about 6 inches thick, put his foot on it and shattered it into tiny pieces. Then he said, "When you can do that you can walk however you want!"

OK what's going on here? Old man crushes stone by pushing down on it. Even if he put double his own weight it would not be enough. I've crushed cobble stones--with a sledge hammer. It normally takes a very hard heavy object, like a hammer, being swung from a height to break a stone.

So what is the story supposed to teach us? That Dong was a god made out of steel? That we should just shut up and practice otherwise we'll have to listen to silly stories? That Dong had mastered bring down the Qi of Heaven? Whatever. No, there must be a point to the story.

My take on this story is that every stone has fissures and invisible crack already in it. Dong's foot was so sensitive that when he put his foot on the stone he could feel all the places where it would crack. As he applied pressure his foot expanded and spread all the tiny fissures apart and the rock just crumbled.

To do this your foot would have to be wiggly and dynamic like an octopus and it would have to be as sensitive as a baby's cheek! (OK that's your homework.)

Steps of Perfection (part 1)

Before our former vice president invented the internet I had a habit of reading thick scholarly books. Now, I have to go hide out in the mountains for a few days or feign illness if I want to get through something really erudite.

While I love these books they are the opposite of juicy. That being said, if you have the discipline or isolation to really read a book, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton, is an impressive work.

This book falls in the the category of books which are so scholarly they hint at the juicy ground breaking ideas rather than say them outright. With a book like this you have to read the footnotes or you might miss the best part of the argument.

The book is about a type of Chinese martial dance called Jiajiang which runs roughshod over all Western categories of conceptualization to such an extent that it takes a whole book just to say what the dance is. Sutton took a lot of video in 1993 while researching this book, and I would give one of my best swords to see the best of that tape. The book should have a DVD, but I guess the author didn't have proper releases or something (he hasn't answered my emails on this question so I don't know.)

(Here is a google video search for Jiajiang, someone with better Chinese language skills can probably find some better stuff, wink, wink? )

The scope of this book appears on the face of it to be narrow, but the implications of the book for conceptualizing Chinese martial arts, medicine and religion are huge. I'm going to spend a few days talking about this book so let me spin off for a minute to get you oriented.

The long history of the survival of various civilizations could be viewed as the project of getting nice people to fight. There are now and there have always been, humans who love killing. The duty of the civilized and the free is to see to it that people who love killing do not get into positions of power; and that in the event that such people do get into positions of power, they get taken out.

How that happens in each and every civilization or era is different. Historically in China there were several layers of organized armed groups which shared the duty of keeping power civil: Standing armies, militias, small professional forces maintained by a magistrate, and local family protection societies.

How do you get people to support the common good in an environment in which there are competing interests. Part of what this book deals with is how people are connected through ritual, and how various needs of the different layers of society find their way into ritual expression. Yikes that's a mouthful.

The jiajiang martial dancers share some of the important roots of modern martial arts. Sutton maps a spacial environment in which different ways of organizing reality overlap and interact.

In one corner you have Daoist ritual which is done in private. Orthodox Daoists by definition do not subordinate to deities. They perform rituals with cosmological forces that go unseen by the general public, but exist in peoples' imaginations. People know about them, even if they don't see them. Daoists are part of a bigger landscape of ritual relationships, and they represent a particular approach to life.

In another corner are the representatives of a government which has its own rituals. Historically, for instance, magistrates would arrive in an area with a sedan chair and an entourage, sometimes huge processions demonstrating real power.

In another corner there are the trance-mediums who publicly speak for and with the gods, controlling and healing people with other worldly powers, spells, and self-mortification.

Then there is the corner of medicine and elite scholarly exchange which merges in to the much larger realm of commerce.

And then there is the popular realm where local elites interact with the guy who drives the gravel truck. Where martial artists train and perform gongfu, where school kids learn martial dance routines for a two day festival procession that twists around visiting local temples and homes. Where the presence of the dead is felt in places people frequent and exorcism is a regular occurrence. A place where gods and demons possess not just mediums, but the guy you went to high school with.

The fighting dream dances of Taijiquan and Baguazhang came out of this world, and like everything else that grew up in Chinese society, these arts have a limb in each corner.

Milieu

I've been reading the book Qigong Fever, it's good, but I'm not ready to review it yet. However, part of the methodology of the book is to investigate the milieu which inspired the invention, expression, and propagation of qigong as a "movement."

I like this kind of thinking. When I was in high school I was in a School of the Arts and I did a lot of ceramics. I got really interested in Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Chinese ceramics. Then I went to Australia where I had a ceramics teacher who was also totally into Sung Dynasty glazes and was trying to replicate the way they made them with natural local minerals (like ash from near by forest fires) and at the same time adding some scientific analysis.

I also got way into dance, dance history, and improvisation. What these two things have in common is milieu. Modern dance, for instance, came out of a very specific cultural milieu and I think it started to stagnate when that milieu ended. Sung Dynasty ceramics had huge cooperative workshops with dragon kilns that burn once a year up the side of a mountain. Each group got the right to fire its huge kiln from the imperial court which held regular competitions for its patronage. If your kiln won the competition, you supplied the entire royal family for a year or so until they had a new competition. This created a really competitive environment where everyone was making imperial quality work, but only one "kiln" was getting to sell it to the royal family so there was literally tons of extraordinary art work floating around. This milieu created the worlds first antique markets.

So when I was in my early twenties and studying gongfu 6 hours a day it occurred to me that neither my gongfu teachers, nor their teachers had lived in a milieu that was capable of inspiring the creation gongfu as I knew it (Shaolin, Taijiquan, Xingyi, Bagua).

I held and thought about that question for many years.  I was still asking that question when I really started getting into Daoist Religion.  (Daoism isn't directly responsible for the creation of gongfu, but it is in the mix.)

My point is this: The main reason I have been writing this blog for the last six months is to both explain what I have learned over the years about the milieu which inspired Chinese Martial Arts generations ago, and to create a new milieu which will re-inspire the arts.

Why I'm Unbalanced

Several years ago, one of my advanced Baguazhang students said to me, "My ankles are wiggling all the time and I'm completely unstable on my feet." It was a break-through for her. She was experiencing things as they are, ziran. This is high level gongfu, this is the purpose of cultivating weakness.

A person standing on two feet is an unstable structure.

There is no such thing as balanced movement. There is only unbalanced movement. The feeling of balance is the result of an unconscious process in which we are constantly readjusting. Fear of falling causes us to develop foot and leg muscles which are constantly at work to keep us feeling balanced. What most people call "rooting" in martial arts is simply a continuation of this process.

One of the reasons the higher levels of martial arts are so hard to achieve is because we are afraid to give up this unconscious reliance on our legs for balance.

Toddlers balance by moving their torsos while their legs remain soft and springy. In Taijiquan we say, "Move from the tantian," but most people use their leg muscles for balance and power which limits the expression of the tantian. To achieve the higher levels of martial arts the legs must be part of the movement of the "tantian," not a separate force. If toddlers can do it, so can you!
The way I learned Baguazhang, I was told to always be "on balance," and to always be able to "turn on a dime." Thus forward motion was propelled by twisting and pulsing the legs. There is a Yin style Baguazhang school in San Francisco that teaches the opposite. They teach that one should always be leaning so that one's spirals will be driven by the momentum of falling. Both these ideas are missing the mark.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (last chapter)

The last chapter of The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, is titled "A Moving Yi Jing." The meat and potatoes of this chapter are two great lists.

The first list is a paragraph for each of the qi transmissions associated with each of the eight "mother palms" and gua (trigrams) of B.K. Frantzis's baguazhang system (which has no form).

The qi transmissions are supplemented in the applications section too. The authors clearly and succinctly describe the feeling of each palm change; how it moves and what makes it distinct. They also explain that the best way to develop these qi transmissions is through the practice of Soft-hands, Roshou (a dynamic moving and slapping version of push-hands).

I plan to do a video for each of the Baguazhang qi transmissions with in a year.

What is a Daoist Body? 

The second list is this:

1. The Physical Body


2. The Qi Body


3. The Emotional Body


4. The Thinking Body


5. The Psychic Body


6. The Causal Body


7. The Body of Individuality


8. The body of the Dao

The authors give very short descriptions of what each category might mean, calling them energy bodies. Beyond that what they say is embarrassing for it's lack of connection to anything real.  (Baguazhang is not a self-help program, and neither is the Yijing.)
Religious Daoism conceptualizes a human being as not just one body but many bodies. Calling them "energy bodies" is misleading. Your house is a body that you share with everyone else who lives there. You can clean, remodel, or move to another house, but the fact that you have such a body is a given. All bodies relate to other bodies. If you live in a damp shack for a month your physical body will start to creek at the joints and your lung capacity will decrease (effecting your qi body).

The way religious Daoists conceptualize it, we share a body with everyone who reads this blog or speaks English. More importantly, we share a body with everyone who makes the same commitments we do, thus Christians all share a body, Muslims all share a body, and everyone who worships Guanyin shares a body.

Ghosts have very weak bodies, demons and gods very strong ones (we give them our strength).

Horror movies are so visceral because as you watch them your various "commitment bodies" are being contorted, poked and exploded. (Obviously, I love the horror genre.)

This is a list used to train Daoist exorcists. In order to do an exorcism you must be able to recognize all the different types of possession in other people and in yourself.

1. Physical possession is pain. In it's lesser forms we recognize it as tension or even "strength." Physical possession causes people to lash out and to blame.


2. Qi possession is associated with controlling the breath, it amplifies feelings, creates excitement and it can lead to transcendent states. (Godlike or "I can't feel my body" types of disassociation.) Mania.


3. Emotional possession translates perfectly into English. Possessed by fear, anger, love, etc...


4. Thinking possession is like believing that the oceans are going to rise because we drive to work. Or that everything that happens in the Middle-East matters. You know, "Global Conspiracy," "The world is in crisis, dude."


5. Psychic possession is believing you know what someone else is thinking, or what is about to happen next.


6. Causal possession is like schizophrenia. When you think objects or icons or voices in your head are the cause of something in the real world. Profound disassociation.


7. The body of Individuation is supreme ego-mania. There are a number of narcotics that can bring about this near-death experience. It is when you feel/believe that you are the cause and purpose of everything.


8. The body of the Dao is a complete death. Sometimes call immortality. It is experience without any limits or conceptions.

Baguazhang is a dance form that explores all the different ways we can become possessed.  It is dancing with what it is to be alive.  Perhaps we could think of it as a personal, daily exorcism, although that certianly isn't traditional.

In case I lost you-- and you don't see the connection to martial arts-- notice that I just made a really good list of what might cause someone to attack you.